My friend Bill Dollins published a well-deserved and timely farewell to ArcMap. My story is different.

I used ArcMap yesterday, and I’ll use it tomorrow (literally). 

Am I a luddite? No. I have been using ArcGIS Pro since the beta, and I continue to use it daily. I use QGIS daily. I keep my master database in PostgreSQL / PostGIS.

I also have a business process (not my choice) where I periodically must ingest Microsoft Access data and join an Access table to a shapefile. Pro doesn’t see Access, so I use Map for that.

Can I do my job without Map? Sure, I have done it, and I have blogged extensively about it. I have developed a process for bringing Access data into Pro. But using Access with Map is just simpler. So I will continue to use Map.

With my career as a GIS professional itself on a path to sunsetting, I wonder whether I am an outlier by continuing to use Access and shapefiles (as it would seem from just looking at Mastodon), or whether there are thousands of other quiet souls who don’t toot, yet silently continue to perform their daily GIS tasks using shapefiles and Access.

We may never know.